Yahoo announced their fourth quarter 2009 earnings just minutes ago. They reported better than expected earnings, with a decline in revenue of only 4%, year over year. Most of that decline came from a 15% drop in search ad revenue from Q4 2008 compared to Q4 2009. But Yahoo’s search ad dollars increased from Q3 2009 to Q4 2009 by 4%.

“The fourth quarter marked a strong finish to 2009, which was a transformative year for Yahoo!,” said Yahoo! Chief Executive Officer Carol Bartz. “We beat the high end of our revenue guidance, saw demand for premium display advertising improve significantly, and grew Owned & Operated search advertising revenue sequentially for the first time since the third quarter of 2008.

You can download the Yahoo announcement as a PDF document.

Here are the Yahoo financial highlights:

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Top News | Yahoo: Business Issues

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz

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